Bill HangDental Practitioner, Lecturer at OrthO2Health

E.R.R.S. (Extraction Retraction Regret Syndrome™) | AAO Meeting - Measuring Airways

14 Apr 2020 · 1 min

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In this personal account, the speaker describes attending the American Association of Orthodontists (AAO) meeting in May 2001 in Toronto, where he examined pre‑ and post‑treatment radiographs and models displayed for American Board of Orthodontics cases. Using a Boley gauge, he measured the airway dimensions on each patient’s x‑rays, regardless of whether extractions were performed. His measurements indicated that conventional orthodontic treatments tended to reduce airway size, whereas patients treated with the orthotropic approach showed an increase in airway dimensions. The speaker expresses alarm at these findings and emphasizes the potential clinical significance of airway changes resulting from different orthodontic philosophies.

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That spurred me to go to American Association of Orthodontists meeting, and I did that in May of 2001. Flew to Toronto, and I went along with my wife, and we went into the room where they had all the American Board of Orthodontics cases sitting there. On tables, they'd have the models and the x-rays and the pictures and the write-up of the case. And I was there with a Boley gauge measuring the pretreatment and post-treatment x-rays to see the size of the airway. Of every patient, whether they had teeth taken out or not, and what I saw alarmed me. And then I went home and did a little calculation, which is not as sophisticated as we might be able to do today, but I, in my own mind, saw that these airways were being reduced. I put that together with that information that basically traditional orthodontics was causing the airway to be smaller, with what I was producing with the orthotropic patients, The airway was getting bigger, and I thought to myself, this is a big deal.